5 ms·

Starting today: Go, C#, Rust, possibly TypeScript (not my personal choice but probably acceptable), Java (which despite being poorly done in a lot of places doe

by jerf 3y ago

Starting today: Go, C#, Rust, possibly TypeScript (not my personal choice but probably acceptable), Java (which despite being poorly done in a lot of places does have the tooling necessary for this if used by decent programmers). C++ with a super-strong static analysis tool like Coverity used from day one. (I consider C or C++ plus something like Coverity to be essentially a different language than using just a C or C++ compiler.) And that's sticking to reasonably mainstream languages. F#, D, Scala, Haskell, Lisp with strong typing around the money parts (or Clojure), probably a couple of others as well. These have problems with having smaller communities and being harder to hire for, but I'd bet that pretty much all of them still have well-supported libraries for nearly everything a financial company would need to do. (And that you could expect general open source libraries for. Super-specific internal financial protocols may not have libraries in general, or may only be in Java, etc.) Also I make no exclusivity claims that these are the only appropriate languages, so if you've got a favorite statically-typed language feel free to just mentally edit it in without asking me how I could possibly miss it. (I'm not familiar enough with the Objective-C family to have informed opinions about it, for instance.) Dynamically-typed languages with progressive typing used rigidly around the money might be OK, but progressive typing makes me nervous and really seems like a bodge in a lot of places. Reading people's experiences with them, even when the person writing the experience is nominally positive on the experience, has not generally impressed me.

throwaway2037 3y ago
In my experience writing software that performs financial calculations, it is easy to screw up in any language. I'm not sure that any of those languages provide a great enough advantage specific to financial calculations, considering all of the other baggage. To state the obvious, most apps that perform financial calculations are not performing financial calculations in 99% of the code.
- jerf 3y ago
  Well, I was as broad as "statically typed" versus "dynamically typed" for a reason. Dynamically typed languages have a hard time enforcing much of anything. Statically-typed languages can do things like "type Pennies int", or create a structure with a value and attached currency type, or create a structure with a value, currency type, and attached timestamp, or even have all of those at once, while making it practical to have functions that never mix any of them up. I'm writing a lot of email-related code right now, porting something out of Perl into Go, and because this code supports Google-style "+" addressing, where "anemail+something@gmail.com" and "anemail+other@gmail.com" need to be tracked as separate recipients (as defined by the SMTP protocol) but I also have a slate of functions that need to operate on the mailbox, as identified by "anemail@gmail.com", using some types to keep the two things straight has greatly cleaned up the translated Go code, whereas in Perl it was all just strings and there are constant repeated snippets of code trying to (inconsistently!) translate between the two on demand and with no compiler support as to whether it is being done correctly. I wouldn't be surprised this fixes longstanding and hard-to-diagnose bugs simply by the act of imposing a static type system on top of the mass of dynamically-typed goo. I'm fairly sure I've identified at least one place in the old code that it failed to do the conversion, but in dynamically-typed languages it's hard to even be sure about that. Statically typed languages do not automatically or magically make dealing with currency easier and safer than dynamically type languages. A static language's compiler will not peep as you pass around an "integer" that represents US pennies, or maybe Euro pennies, or maybe Yen, or maybe Italian Lira as of March 23, 1981. But if you have a need to do so, and a need to do it safely, static languages give you much more rigid and safe tools to do it with. (You can create a "currency" type in dynamically-typed languages that is a lot smarter than an int, certainly, but you can't use the interpreter to rigidly enforce that it is used correctly, and the various incremental or progressive typing options I've seen generally fail to impress me. The cultural temptation in a dynamically-typed language to allow functions to also just take an int and then "guess" the rest will be overwhelming based on my experience and it takes a strong developer lead to push back against people sneaking that in.) While you're right that only small bits of the code may be doing calculations, a lot of the app may be dealing with money in some sense. In a statically-typed language used correctly, the money values can at least pass through those parts of the system unambiguously, carrying exactly what they are, and the parts of the system doing the calculation doesn't need to do a lot of defensive programming to ensure that the currency values are actually of the expected type. Code pulling these values out of the database should put them into the correct type, code displaying them to users should be using this information correctly. Not just things "calculating" with the money but anything that touches money values, passes them along, serializes or deserializes them, all of it is cleaned up by having a precise specification of what it is that is maintained all the way through the app.

by jerf 3y ago

throwaway2037 3y ago

In my experience writing software that performs financial calculations, it is easy to screw up in any language. I'm not sure that any of those languages provide a great enough advantage specific to financial calculations, considering all of the other baggage. To state the obvious, most apps that perform financial calculations are not performing financial calculations in 99% of the code.

jerf 3y ago
Well, I was as broad as "statically typed" versus "dynamically typed" for a reason. Dynamically typed languages have a hard time enforcing much of anything. Statically-typed languages can do things like "type Pennies int", or create a structure with a value and attached currency type, or create a structure with a value, currency type, and attached timestamp, or even have all of those at once, while making it practical to have functions that never mix any of them up. I'm writing a lot of email-related code right now, porting something out of Perl into Go, and because this code supports Google-style "+" addressing, where "anemail+something@gmail.com" and "anemail+other@gmail.com" need to be tracked as separate recipients (as defined by the SMTP protocol) but I also have a slate of functions that need to operate on the mailbox, as identified by "anemail@gmail.com", using some types to keep the two things straight has greatly cleaned up the translated Go code, whereas in Perl it was all just strings and there are constant repeated snippets of code trying to (inconsistently!) translate between the two on demand and with no compiler support as to whether it is being done correctly. I wouldn't be surprised this fixes longstanding and hard-to-diagnose bugs simply by the act of imposing a static type system on top of the mass of dynamically-typed goo. I'm fairly sure I've identified at least one place in the old code that it failed to do the conversion, but in dynamically-typed languages it's hard to even be sure about that. Statically typed languages do not automatically or magically make dealing with currency easier and safer than dynamically type languages. A static language's compiler will not peep as you pass around an "integer" that represents US pennies, or maybe Euro pennies, or maybe Yen, or maybe Italian Lira as of March 23, 1981. But if you have a need to do so, and a need to do it safely, static languages give you much more rigid and safe tools to do it with. (You can create a "currency" type in dynamically-typed languages that is a lot smarter than an int, certainly, but you can't use the interpreter to rigidly enforce that it is used correctly, and the various incremental or progressive typing options I've seen generally fail to impress me. The cultural temptation in a dynamically-typed language to allow functions to also just take an int and then "guess" the rest will be overwhelming based on my experience and it takes a strong developer lead to push back against people sneaking that in.) While you're right that only small bits of the code may be doing calculations, a lot of the app may be dealing with money in some sense. In a statically-typed language used correctly, the money values can at least pass through those parts of the system unambiguously, carrying exactly what they are, and the parts of the system doing the calculation doesn't need to do a lot of defensive programming to ensure that the currency values are actually of the expected type. Code pulling these values out of the database should put them into the correct type, code displaying them to users should be using this information correctly. Not just things "calculating" with the money but anything that touches money values, passes them along, serializes or deserializes them, all of it is cleaned up by having a precise specification of what it is that is maintained all the way through the app.